A Sunless Sea (41 page)

“Indeed not,” he agreed softly. “Even the very closest of friends cannot reach out far enough to touch such a loss. Death is terrible in itself, but that a person should have taken his own life is so very much worse.”

“She never believed that!” Mrs. Moulton said urgently, leaning forward over the rail as if three or four inches less between them would lend power to her words. “She always said that he had been killed to … to keep his work from being accepted. I am sure she believed that.”

“Indeed, Mrs. Moulton, so do I,” Rathbone agreed. “In fact I intend to make that clear to the jury.”

A flicker of displeasure crossed Coniston’s face.

Pendock was irritated but he did not interrupt.

Rathbone hurried on, gaining a lick of confidence, which was like a flame in the wind, any moment to be extinguished.

“When the police arrested her and accused her of murdering Zenia Gadney, she told them that she had been with you at the time she was said to have been seen in Copenhagen Place, searching for Mrs. Gadney. Is that correct?”

Helena Moulton looked uncomfortable. “Yes.” She said it so quietly that Pendock had to ask her to repeat her answer so the jury could hear her. “Yes,” she said with a sudden jolt.

Rathbone smiled at her, very slightly, in reassurance. “And was she with you at that time, Mrs. Moulton?” he asked.

“No.”

Pendock leaned forward.

“No,” she said more clearly. “She … she said that she was with me at a soirée. I don’t know why on earth she said that. I couldn’t support her. I was at an art exhibition, and dozens of people saw me. There wasn’t a soirée anywhere near us that day.”

“So it was quite impossible that she was telling the truth,” Rathbone concluded.

“Yes, it was.”

Coniston rose to his feet again. “My lord, my learned friend is wasting time again. We have already established that the accused was lying! That is not an issue.”

“My lord.” Rathbone faced Pendock. “That is not the point I am trying to make. What Mr. Coniston has apparently missed is the fact that Dinah Lambourn could never have expected to be believed in that statement.”

Coniston spread his hands. It was a gesture of helplessness, inviting the court in general, and the jury in particular, to conclude that Rathbone was indeed doing no more than using up time in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable.

“Sir Oliver.” Pendock was exasperated. “This seems to be a completely pointless exercise. If you have some conclusion to all this … farrago, please let the court know what it is.”

Rathbone was being hurried far more than he wished, but he could see in Pendock’s face that he was going to get no more latitude. Now was the moment to tell them Dinah’s brave and desperate gamble.

“My lord, I am trying to show the jury that Dinah Lambourn believed
that her husband had been defamed by having his report refused, and his professional ability slandered. Then when he would not accept that and go away quietly, denying what he knew to be true, he was murdered, and his death made to appear as suicide.”

There was a burst of noise from the gallery. Someone shouted out abuse. Another cheered. The jury swung round in their seats, looking one way and then another.

Pendock demanded order.

Coniston appeared impatient and then disgusted.

As soon as he could be heard, Rathbone continued, raising his voice above the rustle of movement and mutter of voices. “She was willing to face trial for a murder she did not commit,” he said loudly. “In order to gain a public hearing for her husband’s contrived disgrace and to oblige at least someone to investigate his death again.” He turned to face the astonished jury. “She is willing to risk her own life so that you, as representatives of the people of England, can hear the truth of what Joel Lambourn discovered, and judge for yourselves whether he was a good man, honest and capable, trying to serve the people of this country, or whether he was deluded, vain, and in the end suicidal.”

He pointed up toward the dock. “That is how much she loved him—still loves him. She killed no one—nor does she know who did—either Joel Lambourn, or the unfortunate Zenia Gadney. And, by the grace of God, and the laws of England, I will prove that to you.”

There was uproar in the gallery and this time Pendock’s calls for order were useless. He cleared the court, ordering an early adjournment for the day. Then he rose to his feet and strode out, his great red gown flying out behind him like broken scarlet wings.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, R
ATHBONE
was prepared to call both Adah and Marianne Lambourn if necessary, simply to stretch out the time and give Monk every chance to find at least some element of truth that would raise doubt. Originally, Rathbone had hoped to learn who had killed Zenia, and be able to prove it. If he could even prove Lambourn did not commit suicide, it would make Dinah look rational, sympathetic, but so far he had been blocked in that at every step. Now there was only the
suggestion of a manipulative figure behind the murder that he must give flesh to.

Perhaps he should not have been surprised. If Dinah was right then someone with power had a great deal to hide, and both Coniston and Pendock had been advised of it. There must also have been the threat that his exposure would damage someone’s reputation irrevocably, and with it, perhaps, the honor of the government.

He admitted to himself he was depending on proving reasonable doubt: the possibility of there being any other answers, no matter how vague, whose existence he could prove. He just had to last today and tomorrow, then the courts were closed for Christmas, which would give them a brief reprieve, until Tuesday. But he also knew that darkening Christmas with the necessity to return immediately after would not endear him to anyone. He would not have done it had he any other choice.

In the morning he called Dinah Lambourn’s servants, who had nothing to reveal of their mistress’s behavior on the nights her husband and Zenia Gadney died that would implicate her in any way.

Rathbone’s first witness of the afternoon was the shopkeeper who had described Dinah’s visit to Copenhagen Place, and the extreme emotion she had exhibited, so much so that most of the shoppers in the street now felt as if they had seen her, and should have realized who and what she was.

But Rathbone knew that the mind can deceive the eye. He hoped that his discussion with Mr. Jenkins had shown the man how much had been suggested by circumstance, and that what he was experiencing was not in fact memory but hindsight. It was something of a risk to put him on the stand where Coniston could question him immediately afterward, but he had nothing left to lose. Please God, Monk or Runcorn had learned something of value, however fragile.

Mr. Jenkins took the stand looking very nervous to be out of the security of his own shop and the trade with which he was familiar. He gripped the rail as though he were at sea and the whole stand was tossing like the bridge of a ship. Was that the very understandable anxiety of a man in extraordinary surroundings, knowing that a woman’s life might rest on what he said? Or did he plan now to go back on what he
had told Rathbone, and he was afraid of Rathbone’s anger—or of Coniston’s anger, and the weight of the established law should he displease them?

Rathbone must set him at his ease as much as he could. He walked forward to be close enough to the witness stand not to have to raise his voice to be heard.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Jenkins,” he began. “Thank you for giving us your time. We appreciate that you have a business to run and that your customers require you every day but Sunday. I will not keep you long. You have a general grocery shop in Copenhagen Place, Limehouse, is that correct?”

Jenkins cleared his throat. “Yes, sir, I do.”

“Are most of your customers local people, living, say, within half a mile or so of your shop?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Because people need groceries of one sort or another almost every day and naturally would not wish to carry them farther than necessary?” Rathbone asked.

Coniston shifted impatiently in his seat.

Pendock looked annoyed.

Only the jury were listening with attention, believing something pertinent and perhaps controversial was coming. Rathbone was famous, his reputation formidable. If they had not known that before the trial began, they knew it now.

“Yes, sir,” Jenkins agreed. “I know ’em, like. I keep the things they need. They don’t ’ave ter ask.”

“So you would notice a stranger in your shop?” Rathbone smiled as he said it. “Someone who did not live locally, perhaps whose needs you did not know.”

Jenkins gulped. He knew the importance of the question. “I reckon so.” Already he was less sure, an equivocation in his words, not a certainty.

“Say, a well-dressed woman who was not from Limehouse, who had never bought her groceries from you, and who carried no bag or basket in which to put whatever she bought,” Rathbone elaborated.

Jenkins stared at him.

Rathbone had to be as absolute as possible. There would be no going back and retracing his steps or he would sound desperate, and the jury would hear it.

“I imagine you are friendly or at least comfortable with most of your customers, Mr. Jenkins? They are decent people going about their business?”

“Yes … yes, course they are,” Jenkins agreed.

“So a woman behaving wildly, hysterically, would be extraordinary in your shop?”

Coniston rose to his feet.

Rathbone turned to him, carefully assuming a look of amazement and questioning on his face and in the angle of his head.

Coniston gave a sigh of exasperation, as if infinitely bored, and resumed his seat. None of this would be lost on the jury. But their concentration would have been momentarily broken, the emotion lessened.

“My learned friend appears not to have perceived the importance of my question, Mr. Jenkins,” Rathbone said with a smile. “Perhaps it is unclear to others as well. I am trying to show that your shop is a local service. You know all the women in the area who use your establishment to purchase their daily needs of tea, sugar, flour, vegetables, and so on. They are decent and civil people, feeling that they are among friends. A woman you have never seen before, and nobody else appears to know, and whose manner is hysterical and demanding, is highly unusual, and you would be likely to remember her, in fact be almost certain to. Is that correct?”

Jenkins now had no alternative but to agree. Perhaps Coniston, by interrupting, had unintentionally done the defense a favor? Rathbone did not dare to look at him to see. It would be obvious to the jury, and they would see gamesmanship behind it.

“I … I suppose I would,” Jenkins conceded.

“Then would you please look up at the dock and tell me if you are certain that the woman sitting there is the same woman who came into your shop and asked to know where Zenia Gadney lived? We have already heard that it was a woman tall and dark, who looked something like her, but there are thousands of such women in London. Are you sure, beyond doubt, that it was this woman? She swears that it was not.”

Jenkins peered up at Dinah, blinking a little as if he could not see clearly.

“My lord,” Rathbone looked up at Pendock, “may I have the court’s permission to ask the accused to rise to her feet?”

Pendock had no choice; the request was only a courtesy. He would have to explain any refusal, and he had no grounds for it.

“You may,” he replied.

Rathbone turned to the dock and Dinah rose to her feet. It was an advantage. Rathbone realized it immediately. They could all see her more clearly, and every single juror was craning his neck to stare. She looked pale and grief-ravaged, and in a way more beautiful than when she had been in her own home, surrounded by familiar things. She had not yet been found guilty in the law, even if she had by the public, so she was permitted to wear her own clothes. Since she was still in mourning for her husband, it was expected she wear black, and with her dramatic features and pale, blemishless skin the loveliness of her face was startling, as was the suffering in it. She was composed, as if she had no energy left to hope, or to struggle.

Jenkins gulped again. “No.” He shook his head. “I can’t say as it were ’er. She … she looks different. I don’t recall ’er face being like that.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jenkins,” Rathbone said, gasping with relief inside. “My learned friend may wish to question you, but as far as I am concerned, I appreciate your time, and you are free to go back to your business and your service to the community in Copenhagen Place.”

“Yes, sir.” Jenkins turned anxiously toward Coniston.

Coniston’s hesitation was only fractional, but it was there. At least one or two of the jurors must have seen it.

“Mr. Jenkins,” Coniston began gently, aware of the court’s sympathy with the shopkeeper. He was a man like themselves, probably with family to support, trying to do his best in a situation he hated. He was eager to be done with it and free to carry on with his quiet, hardworking life, complete with its small pleasures, its opinions that were not weighed and measured, its very limited responsibility.

Rathbone knew all this was going through Coniston’s mind, because it had gone through his own.

Coniston smiled. “Actually, Mr. Jenkins, I find I have nothing to ask you. You are an honest man in a wretched situation, placed there by chance, and none of your own doing. Your compassion, carefulness, and modesty are to be admired. Please accept my thanks also, and return to your business, which I’m sure must need you, most particularly this close to Christmas.” Coniston gave a very slight bow and walked back gracefully to his seat.

Pendock’s face was tense. He glanced at the clock, then at Rathbone.

“Sir Oliver?”

Rathbone rose to his feet.

“My next witness may testify at some length, my lord, and I believe Mr. Coniston is bound to wish to question some of his evidence quite closely.” He too looked at the clock. He would not like to have to admit that he could not locate Runcorn at this hour, but he would if Pendock forced him into it.